Timber!!!!!!!

We live in the woods.  Okay.  Not really....but Jeffery certainly thinks so and he's not far off.  We are blessed to live in a neighborhood that has a lot of old growth trees.  And our property especially feels like you're in the woods.  Dave counted sometime last year and found that we have 22 oak trees.  22!  That is a lot!  A lot of leaves that fall....a lot of acorns (you have NO idea the acorns this year!)....a lot of silk/inch worms in the spring (I hate and abhor silk/inch worms)...a lot of shade in the summer...and lot of glorious color in the fall.  A lot of everything.  22 trees also means that there is a lot of possibility that one will come down sooner or later....and you just hope and keep your fingers crossed that it doesn't come down on your house.....or someone else's house.  

Well....we had one come down a couple weeks ago.  The tree was the biggest one on our property.  It was a mammoth red oak that sat on the corner and whose branches covered the street below.  Even when we moved in last year, I noticed the tree was not in good health.  Many of the limbs were simply dead with absolutely no foliage.  After the spring, many of the limbs that had been healthy last year, were now dead.  The huge limbs hung, in my opinion, precariously above the street where people parked their car and walked every day.  Every storm that came, I prayed nothing bad would happen. And then, about a month ago, Dave found a split in the trunk up at the halfway mark of the tree.  It was time to call in the experts.

I met with tree guy who gave me an estimate and told me to think it over.  It needed to be done, we knew that, but yikes!  Oh, the joys of home ownership!  :(  But we knew the tree had to go sooner rather than later.  God decided that it would be "sooner".  4 days after I had spoken to the tree guy, and without any weather to speak of, we woke up at 2:30 in the morning to emergency lights flashing on the street outside our house.  It was a police car....shining his spot light on the corner of our house.....where the massive limb that was part of the split in the tree had just peeled off the tree like you peel a banana.   

It was a massive limb.  But....given that it was 2:30am....it hadn't hit anyone walking underneath it, there weren't any cars parked there, and it even managed to miss the mailbox of the neighbors across the street. And because it peeled off, it came down in a sort of controlled crash and didn't damage the road.  If this was going to happen, it happened under ideal conditions.

However, it was blocking the road.  So Chesterfield's finest came.  We had a police car on one side and a fire truck on the other and it is too bad it was 2:30am because Jeffery would have adored watching all of this!  Turns out that if a tree on your property falls into the road, it is the county's responsibility to deal with the tree.  So, out came the chainsaws and 3 firepeople had that tree cut up into workable pieces and into our yard and out of the street within 15 minutes.  It was amazing.  Dave went out to help as did a neighbor and everyone was back in bed within an hour.

Dave was on the phone the next day with some of our friends who jumped at the chance to work a chainsaw and a chipper and help us cut up the wood and smaller branches.  The fire dept had removed the tree from the road....it was now our job to remove it from our yard.  It was so exciting that even our priests stopped by to have a look!  :)

Our friends, the Foxes, brought their chipper and debris wagon that first day and were an amazing help clearing the debris and sawing the wood and turning the small branches into mulch.  

When the weekend rolled around, Dave and the Foxes were joined by Mr. Doran, another close friend.  His family heats their house with two wood burning Franklin stoves and he needs all the wood he can get....so we gave him all the wood from the massive limb.  You should see this man wield an axe.  Impressive....and a little frightening!  :)  He and Dave were out there chopping wood almost all day and Dave now 1) has a new appreciation for lumberjacks and 2) thinks that would be one of the most physically taxing jobs you could do.  But by the end of that weekend, all evidence of the downed limb was gone.  The neighbors were very impressed....as were we!

It was then time to say goodbye to the rest of the tree.  Spartan Trees came out (seriously....if you're in Richmond and need a tree taken out....call these guys!!!!!  Cannot speak highly enough of them!) and started to work their magic.  It was almost hypnotic to watch them.  One guy rappelled up into the tree and threw down line and after line.  Then, as he is hanging in the tree and balanced on branches, he went to work with his chainsaw.  He was like a monkey up in that tree.  A monkey with a very powerful chainsaw!  Unreal!

The guys below cleared all the debris and then loaded into their huge dump truck.  They took out our street sign post, dug up an azalea, and made a disaster of the street.  And when they left four hours later, everything was put back....they had even replanted the azalea.  They were amazing! 

Like I said earlier, if this was going to happen, we could not have asked for things to have gone more smoothly.  Turns out that the tree had been struck by lightening (before we moved here) and it had gone straight down the center of the tree.  The tree was terminal and we were going to have to deal with it sooner or later.  We are just so thankful that no one was hurt and nothing was damaged.  The tree at least provided some excitement for about a week or so.  And now our dogwood trees really stand out!  :)  So....TIMBER!